The Beloved Judy Blume

Josh and Chuck open by comparing which Judy Blume books they each actually read as kids — Freckle Juice, Superfudge, Blubber, Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great — and land on why an adult writing that convincingly about being eleven is so rare. From there it's a full biography. Judith Marsha Sussman was born in 1938 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to a dentist father who was her closest confidant and a mother who gave her a love of reading. The anxiety came early: wartime dread, a two-year family split when her mother took the kids to Miami Beach, and compulsive rituals — turning a doorknob a set number of times, making deals with God — to keep her father from dying young like his brothers had. Then, over 58 days, three planes out of Newark crashed into Elizabeth, killing a hundred people including eleven townsfolk, an ordeal she fictionalized decades later in In the Unlikely Event. Her father did die of a heart attack, a month before walking her down the aisle.

The writing came late and hard. Married at 21 to lawyer John Bloom and set on the homemaker track, she started writing picture books once her kids were in preschool and collected about six rejection letters a week for two and a half years before The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo landed. Then 1970 delivered both Iggy's House and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, and she published ten books by 1975 — the year she divorced. The hosts argue only S.E. Hinton beat her to realist fiction for young readers (a reveal that floors Josh, who never knew Hinton was a teenage girl), and Hinton wrote about high schoolers while Blume wrote about eleven-year-olds facing puberty as something exciting rather than shameful.

That frankness made her a permanent target. Forever, her 1975 novel the hosts describe as essentially a safe-sex manual — its heroine visits Planned Parenthood before sleeping with her boyfriend — was still on most-banned lists in the 2024–25 school year. Josh's theory: her books embody second-wave feminism talking directly to the next generation, which is exactly what conservative challengers don't want in a school library. Blume answered with decades of anti-censorship work, the Kids Fund in 1981, and Letters to Judy, built from the confessional mail kids sent her. The episode closes on late-life Blume: the 2023 Margaret film, clearing up a Times of London piece that made her sound supportive of J.K. Rowling's transphobia, the bookstore she runs in Key West with husband George Cooper, and the strange coda of Mark Oppenheimer's March 2026 biography — which she read in draft, then publicly disowned without ever saying why.